I WAS A YOUNG PASTOR in my first parish, and a family in the church was nursing a dying grandmother. I did not visit the family. I wasn’t lazy, I was scared. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know that doing something was the very thing I shouldn’t do, and all I needed to do was be there.
When the lady died, I was so embarrassed that I never visited the family or even called them on the phone. I was not asked to do the funeral. Over the years the family never mentioned it, and as far as I could tell, they never held it against me. They knew I was a young buck without a brain in my head.
I can see now why I failed, but I can’t forget the failure. Thankfully. When I want to ignore a hospital call, I remember that circumstance or ones like it—and I get up and make the call.
I’ll admit it: a lot of times I make calls on the sick because doing so is my job, not because I feel compassion for them. Visiting someone in traction just to keep my proverbial hind end out of the sling isn’t the high standard I’m reaching for in ministry, but it keeps me out of trouble.
I don’t quake at the thought of a parishioner scolding me for missing his or her stay in the hospital. Apologizing is never pleasant, but most people are quite forgiving. The real trouble I get into when I don’t visit the sick is with my guilty conscience. It is more difficult to assuage than an angry parishioner. My parishioners forgive and forget, but my conscience does not suffer from Alzheimer’s!
Visiting the suffering to satisfy the conscience is low-level pastoral work. As a form of following Jesus, it beats disobedience, but it never escapes tepidity, which left to itself cools to bloodless apathy.
Granted that it is pathetic to make whipped-dog pastoral visits, should I make these calls with this motivation?
My parishioners assume I arrive out of love. Should I be honest enough to announce that I have come in order to avoid the discomfort of a guilty conscience? I can’t do that. The person might get sicker. And it would short-cut God’s ability to use my bleak obedience. My conscience is relentless, but it is also smart; it forces me to call, not because a lukewarm attempt at pastoral work is better than nothing, but because it knows that God creates out of nothing. I call by faith, not by feeling.
When I arrive in the room of suffering, love takes over. My heart beats faster, my consciousness sharpens, and my innards feel less stable. Compassion happens. What began onerously ends sympathetically. Human kindness ignited by a Spirit spark leads to a Spirit prayer for healing. What a strange turn of events! I walk into a hospital room grumpy because I’m missing the fourth quarter of a football game, and I walk out feeling like Mother Teresa, Jr. It rarely fails.
Is this hypocritical?
If it is hypocritical, it is only so to the extent that being human makes us all look like hypocrites at times. It is deeply human to respond compassionately to suffering. It is also characteristically human to feel less compassion from a distance than in person. This even seems to have been the case with Jesus. There are numerous examples in the Gospels where Jesus was moved to compassion for someone when he encountered them in person. One time a leper came to Jesus, “begging him, and kneeling he said to him, ”If you choose, you can make me clean.’ Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, ‘I do choose. Be made clean!'” (Mark 1:40-41).
The human life of the Son of God gave him sympathy for our struggles against temptation. “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin” (Heb. 4:15). The steadfast love of God produced the Incarnation. One result of the Incarnation was the immediate, physical experience of the human suffering of Jesus, and that produced compassion. Compassion takes flesh; the main words for compassion in both Testaments are words that have to do with flesh.
Splaxna: shaky guts
The big word for compassion in the New Testament is splaxna, a Greek word from which we get the English word “spleen.” In Greek literature splaxna is used at various times for almost all the vital organs, but basically it means something like “guts.” Splaxna is the shakiness we feel in our guts when moved by contact with suffering.
Compassion is the love that most fully exploits the union of body and soul. Splaxna occurs in our soul and in our body. Compassion happens as our disturbed soul pours its love-shock into the body. Compassion is experienced simultaneously as we feel this kind of love in our body and in our soul at the same time. The experience of compassion is deeply spiritual in its genesis and profoundly physical in its revelation. Even in Jesus.
When Lazarus died, Jesus stayed away from the family for two days. Then he led his fearful disciples back to Bethany by the scruff of their necks. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she ran out to meet him. She scolded him and begged him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him” (John 11:21-22).
Jesus responded to her theologically: “Your brother will rise again.”
Martha answered him theologically: “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.”
Jesus continued, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”
Martha said to him, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world” (John 11:23-27). Satisfied, Martha ran to Mary to tell her Jesus had come.
When Mary heard Jesus had come, she ran to him and fell at his feet, weeping, and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:32).
Jesus responded to her differently: “When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved” (John 11:33). He responded to Martha’s theological confrontation with loving theology. He responded to Mary’s tearful confrontation with weeping love issuing from a disturbed spirit and “shaky guts.”
Compassion is Incarnation love: “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood” (John 1:14, The Message). Compassion is the physical movement into the presence of suffering and the spiritual movement into the void created by the sense of abandonment that suffering brings.
Racham: womb love
In the Old Testament, the big word used for God’s compassion is racham, which also means “womb.” God’s compassion for us is like the compassion a mother has for the child in her womb. The ideal is Mary, who compassionately, faithfully held the compassion of God incarnate in her womb.
The coherence of divine love, parental love, and pastoral love is perhaps more pronounced in compassion than in all other types of love. The identity among the three is present in the traditional designation of the pastor/priest as “Father.” The apostle Paul likened his pastoral work to nursing: “We were gentle among you, like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children” (1 Thess. 2:7).
Again, God is the model: “As a father has compassion (racham) for his children, so the Lord has compassion (racham) for those who fear him. For he knows how we were made; he remembers that we are dust” (Ps. 103:13-14).
God has compassion on our vulnerable lives. Parents have compassion for their ever so vulnerable children. And pastors must have compassion for the vulnerable lives of the people they serve. When I walk into the room of suffering, so often eyes look up at me with a deep helplessness that say:
- “How could I have gotten into this mess?”
- “I am lost.”
- “I can’t go on.”
- “Can you help me?”
I also see these eyes at weddings. She came down the aisle dressed like Barbie, except the wedding dress had a maternity cut. She was sixteen, he was eighteen, and they were nice kids. As the father of teenage daughters, I knew the ceremony would be difficult for me emotionally. I didn’t want to bust up, so before the service, I told myself that this kind of thing had been happening for thousands of years. It wasn’t difficult to recall several couples in the church, in their fifties now, who’d started the same way. Funny thing was, they had some of the best marriages in the church.
Having sufficiently objectivized the situation, I headed to the sanctuary with reasonable confidence I could make it through the service. Everything would have been fine except that my last thought as I entered the sanctuary was. Do this service the way you would want it done for one of your daughters.
As she came down the aisle with her dad, I scanned the participants. The groom beamed. The bride glowed. Her dad winced. Her mom cried. His parents bawled. The maid of honor shook, and the best man looked like he was in another world. My voice box began to constrict, and my abdominal muscles weren’t holding me up too well.
After the processional, just before the main part of the service, as the bride and the groom stood in front of me, silent, I waited just a second to look into their utterly vulnerable, melted eyes.
This is the point of decision for me: Do I carry on from here dispassionately like a justice of the peace, or do I enter the empty space of their humility and neediness, compassionately, in the name of the God and Father of us all? One is culturally relevant, the other is spiritually relevant. I decided to love them. I began the service as best I could, scratchy voice and all.
God was good to us. He gave me strength, together with love, and we worshiped and celebrated with tears and with joy, just as I would have wanted it had she been my own daughter or he my own son.
It is precisely vulnerability that is so difficult to deal with. It throws the tenuous nature of our existence into our face. Entering another’s vulnerability, identifying with it, and allowing it to enter us and move us is the goal of compassion.
To say that happens naturally isn’t to say that it comes easily. Even parents often enter their children’s vulnerability out of duty. It is always worth it, but it is never easy. It shouldn’t be easy. Every opportunity to show compassion to our family, our church, or to people on the street is a decision to enter pain.
My goal is not to drain compassion of passion, but to secure compassion as a permanent and reliable feature in our ministries through understanding the proper role of duty in compassion. Compassion is serendipitous, but it is not haphazard. Compassion requires the willingness to put ourselves in proximity to suffering and the willingness to feel it once we are there. Often the willingness is sheer choice. Relegating compassion to a rational decision may seem heartless, but it keeps us working at something that is very difficult.
Bringing God or playing God?
What does compassion do for people? It heals. Jesus showed compassion to the people he healed, and it was more than simply a nice gesture; his compassion was part of his cure. Compassion and prayer both have healing power. Twenty years ago the medical community discovered that simple human compassion shown by hospital personnel helped people get better faster. All of a sudden, nurses got nicer. In recent years they discovered that prayer helps people get better too. Now even secular hospitals employ chaplains. People can be healed by compassion without prayer, and people can be healed by prayer without compassion. An atheist’s compassion may have healing power, paradoxically, like the prayers of a loveless pastor.
But when you combine compassion and prayer, one and one equals three. This is well known. What fascinates me most about compassion is that, in my observation, compassion has the power to solve or at least alleviate the intellectual problem of evil.
Talking broken people through the problem of evil is about as satisfying as talking humble people through their agony about whether they are saved. Theological insights and Bible verses help a little but not a lot. The only sufficient answers to “Job” questions come from God—personally. The sincere Christian with grave doubts about his or her salvation needs the assurance of God’s love directly from God. The broken soul who doubts the existence of good in her world of personal horror needs the same kind of assurance—directly from God.
How do pastors bring God’s love to people? We pray for them, and we bring God’s compassion to them. Sometimes God’s compassion can take the form of theological dialogue.
A woman in her early thirties who had attended worship several Sundays in a row stayed around after the service. She walked up to me and asked in a desperate tone, “Can we talk … right now?”
“Sure, I guess so.”
We sat in a pew, and she began to tremble, but she came to the point: “I usually don’t come to church. I have a hard time with God.” She paused to catch her breath and to test her resolve. She turned her eyes to the ground to say what she had to say, but she did not speak timidly.
“My father and my uncle molested me all through my childhood until I moved out and joined the army. How could God allow that?”
She said it that quickly and that bluntly. At which point she crumpled and began to cry.
She swore and said, “I knew I’d do this.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I listen to people cry for a living.”
I was glad when she snickered. I could tell she was working hard to regain her composure, so I waited until she could look up again. She looked up at me, surprised, I think, that I didn’t scold her for cussing. She waited for my answer. She really thought I might have an answer to her question.
I gave her the only answer I know: “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, ‘you don’t know?’ ” she retorted with an edge of anger.
I think she felt cheated, as if her profound candor deserved a deep answer. Which it did. I could only respond to her with candor.
“I know it doesn’t sound like much of an answer,” I said, “but the reason I say that I don’t know why things like that happen is that I really don’t know. I don’t why God does what he does, or why he allows what he allows, or why bad things happen at all. God doesn’t tell me. I really don’t know.”
This seemed to calm her down.
Theological honesty is a form of compassion with power to soothe. As I spoke to her, I thought about how much I really do believe in God’s providence in our lives. But just because I believe God is sovereign doesn’t mean I have the slightest idea why things happen, or how or why he allows things to happen.
But to respond blithely that God didn’t have anything to do with her situation, that somehow stuff like this just happens by chance or is caused by the devil and that God doesn’t have any say in the matter at all, would have failed her grievously. It would have been tantamount to saying that God does not exist.
In pastoral care we have two choices: we can bring God to people, or we can play God with people. I have learned I don’t need to answer people’s questions so much as I need to bring the answer to them in the form of compassion. I allowed myself to feel her pain—as best I could and as overwhelming as doing so was for me—and maybe what I felt for her was some of God’s pain for her. That’s what she really needed to feel—God’s pain for her suffering. The problem of evil is incomprehensible, but it is not insoluble; compassion dissolves it.
She and I talked longer about the trials of her childhood, and then I told her something that every person in her situation needs to hear: “I don’t have a lot of answers for this kind of stuff, but I can tell you this—I believe you. I believe every word you’ve told me. And even though I’ve never experienced what you have experienced, and I can’t begin to imagine what it must have been like to go through all that or what it must be like to live with it now, believe me, I believe you when you tell me how horrible it was then and how horrible it is now to try to live. It took a lot of guts for you to come here today and to be as honest with me as you have been. I know that God honors your honesty. And who knows, maybe, with time, love, and prayer, you can receive some healing for all this.”
She expressed her appreciation for what I’d said, but she still needed to test my compassion. She needed to know whether the church was a place where she could get some help. She just blurted it out: “I can’t say ‘Our Father’ when you pray the Lord’s Prayer.” She looked me dead in the eye as she said it. She was looking for a flinch. I didn’t.
“That’s okay. Don’t say it. It’s fine with me. I’m sure it’s okay with God. He understands your problem with that.”
I smiled a little when she said, “You mean God isn’t going to strike me dead?”
“Nope. But maybe, someday, you will be able to pray ‘Our Father.’ Don’t rush it. Don’t feel guilty about it. Just watch. Freedom to call God ‘Father’ might just sneak up on you.”
“That would be nice,” she said.
We talked a bit longer, and she left. I was physically and spiritually annihilated the rest of the day. She has hardly missed a Sunday in the last four years.
Compassion in gear
Why is compassion so difficult?
Because it’s hard to enter doubt, chaos, and evil. Yet that is what heals people. So we have to do it. But we can only take so much.
She has her own life to live, her own traumatic past to deal with, but she’s not the only one in our church with her problem or with problems of that magnitude, and I know there’s lots I don’t know about. Too much of this creates a spiritual and emotional overload, which pushes too many watts through our tender circuits. For thirty-six hours after I visited with that woman, I felt like my mental motherboard had been struck by lightening.
Health care workers of all types deal with this every day. Pastors meet it less often, but we suffer from this kind of overload more than the others. Why? Maybe the reason is that the people we care for are family. Even this woman, little as I knew her, was like a sister.
As pastors, we have numerous family members who are sick, dying, in nursing homes, confused, depressed, having marriage problems, abusing drugs and alcohol, unsaved, falling away from Christ, fighting with someone else in the family, and on and on. These people are not our clients. They are not our patients. They are our family. Competent doctors don’t treat their family members. And competent psychologists don’t counsel their children, their spouse, their siblings, or their parents.
But we do this kind of thing all the time, and we must do it, because God does not have clients or patients. God has children. And God requires that we show his children his father-womb-gut-love compassion.
The pain and drain of compassion tempts us to make family into clients and to turn compassion into bedside manner. For the most part, our people know when we are doing this. So what? What happens to our people when we do not show them compassion in their suffering? Lukewarmness, bitterness, backsliding, and atheism can happen.
The intellectual problem of evil crushes the soul not so much because bad things happen to us but because of the festering wounds that have not been healed by compassion. I remember a philosophy professor in college who could not resist a chance to blast religion. Following one of his volleys at faith, a devout student asked him, with kindness, why he did not believe in God. He answered uncharacteristically gently: “Because I have seen too many starving kittens.”
What an opportunity to show him compassion by simply listening to the stories behind that comment!
What kills faith is not so much that people go through the valley of the shadow of death; it is that during and after their suffering they never felt God’s rod and staff comforting them. God is the great Shepherd, and we are his rod and his staff. When we don’t shepherd people through their pain, they don’t wonder where we are so much as they wonder where God is. Scripture tells us that God “heals the brokenhearted, and binds up their wounds” (Ps. 147:3). When we heal hearts and bind wounds, people experience God’s healing. When we refuse to, they wonder why God says he heals but won’t help them.
By consistently failing to show compassion, we symbolize an uncaring god of fate that our people cannot help but despise. That is when they begin to stumble over the problem of evil. When we fail to show compassion, we push people toward ungodliness.
So yes. My conscience is seared with the record of times I have failed to care for people. So often they forgive. But I have seen some of them leave the church family and fall away from the Lord. Is it all my fault? I know it isn’t. People have choices to make. I know I am not the only person in the church called to share God’s love. And sometimes I stay away from parishioners in pain because I know that God wants them to struggle toward his love. My job isn’t to rush into every situation without discernment! I am not God; I am made of dust too. As was Jesus, who retired frequently to a mountain for rest and spiritual refreshment. Nevertheless, etched into my conscience is a record of casualties due to my failure to care.
So I make hospital calls, not because I necessarily feel a whole lot of love for the person but to keep my conscience out of trouble and my compassion in gear. God honors that. He wants me to have a clear conscience in my work. And he wants his children to know that they are loved.
Copyright © 1998 David Hansen
